Show Notes
There is a particular kind of hypocrisy in American politics that we usually explain as selfishness. Someone takes advantage of a government program, then votes to eliminate it. Someone receives financial assistance, then complains about other people receiving financial assistance. Someone benefits from a social program for years, then suddenly becomes deeply concerned about government spending when someone else qualifies for it. We call these people hypocrites. But I think something more interesting is happening. Because hypocrisy describes the contradiction. It doesn’t explain it. The better question is this: Why would someone enthusiastically accept something for themselves, then become angry when somebody else receives exactly the same thing? I recently came across an almost perfect example. A conservative baby boomer was talking about student loan forgiveness. He explained that he had student loan debt himself and that his debt had been forgiven under Joe Biden. He accepted it. He benefited from it. But now that Donald Trump is president, his position is that other people shouldn’t have their student loan debt forgiven. His forgiveness was apparently justified. Yours isn’t.
At first glance, this makes absolutely no sense. If student loan forgiveness is morally wrong, why did he accept it? If people have an obligation to repay the money they borrowed, why didn’t that obligation apply to him? If forgiving debt rewards irresponsible behavior, why wasn’t his forgiveness rewarding irresponsible behavior? You can keep asking questions like this forever, but you’re unlikely to find a consistent ideological principle. Because the principle might not actually be the point. The hierarchy might be. The Difference Between Having Something and Having More Than You Psychologists have spent years studying something called narcissistic rivalry. Researchers Mitja Back, Albrecht Küfner, Michael Dufner and their colleagues developed a model of grandiose narcissism that separates it into two different strategies. The first is narcissistic admiration. This is the part that attempts to elevate the self. Someone wants to be impressive, successful, admired or exceptional. But the second strategy is much darker. Narcissistic rivalry is about protecting a superior position by devaluing other people. That distinction is incredibly important. Imagine two people who both want to feel successful. The first person thinks: I want to succeed. The second thinks: I need to succeed relative to you. Those sound similar. Psychologically, they are very different. The first person can watch you become successful without losing anything. Your success doesn’t change theirs. The second person has a problem. Because if their psychological reward comes from occupying a superior position, your success threatens the distance between you. They don’t necessarily need to lose anything tangible for this to happen.
They can have exactly as much money, exactly as much property and exactly as many opportunities as they had yesterday. But if you move closer to them, their relative position has changed. And sometimes relative position is the thing they actually value. What If the Point Isn’t Winning? Imagine you are the only person in your neighborhood with a swimming pool. Every summer, everyone sees your pool. You have something they don’t. Then every house on your street gets one. You haven’t lost your swimming pool. It’s exactly the same pool. It works exactly the same way. Its usefulness to you hasn’t changed at all. But one thing has disappeared.
The distinction. You no longer have something everyone else doesn’t. For someone motivated primarily by enjoying the pool, that shouldn’t matter very much. For someone motivated by the status attached to owning the pool, it can matter enormously. That difference helps explain a lot more than swimming pools. It helps explain why people can support a benefit when it elevates them and oppose that same benefit when it elevates ev
More from The Lucas Bean Show
There is a particular kind of man who shows up to political rallies in body armor he bought online, drives a truck that has never hauled anything, and screams about strength while falling apart the moment someone disagrees with him. He is not hard to spot. He is the loudest person in any room he enters. He is also, according to decades of research, the most frightened. The video that accompanies this piece covers sociologist Robb Willer’s research on masculine overcompensation: the finding that men whose masculinity is threatened respond with exaggerated displays of dominance, aggression, and toughness. The effect is consistent and measurable. It shows up in attitudes toward war, attitudes toward gay people, and even in what kind of car a man wants to buy. But the research goes much deeper than one study, and the implications stretch far beyond a rally.
There’s a familiar ritual that happens every time an authoritarian movement begins to collapse. The supporters disappear. Not physically. Psychologically. They scrub the evidence, rewrite the timeline, and emerge on the other side with a story they’ve rehearsed just enough to almost believe. “I never really supported him.” “I just voted against the Democrats.” “I don’t talk about politics anymore.” This is happening right now across America. The yard signs are coming down. The hats are going into drawers. The Facebook posts are being deleted. And millions of people who spent a decade loudly and publicly cheering for cruelty are quietly trying to exit the building before someone turns the lights on. The companion video to this piece says what needs to be said plainly: they’re not confused. They’re lying. They know what they did. They know what they defended. And they’re trying to erase the evidence before accountability arrives. This Substack examines why that matters, why it won’t work this time, and what history tells us about populations that try to pretend they were never part of the thing they spent years supporting.
Most political analysis starts with policy. Voters chose this candidate because of the economy, immigration, healthcare, taxes. And for most voters in most elections, that’s probably true. But Donald Trump is not most candidates. And the question that keeps surfacing isn’t why people agree with him. It’s why they love him more every time he does something cruel. The mockery. The insults. The attacks on disabled reporters, Gold Star families, and women. Behavior that would end any other political career has somehow become the foundation of his. In 2021, psychologist Matthew Yalch at Palo Alto University published a study in PLOS ONE titled “Dimensions of pathological narcissism and intention to vote for Donald Trump.” And what he found should make everyone uncomfortable, including the people it describes.
In February 2025, researchers at the University of Amsterdam published a study in Social Science & Medicine that should have rewritten every conversation about why people join the far right. They tracked over 40,000 people across nine countries, with data spanning fifteen years. They controlled for income, education, immigration attitudes, and political ideology. They wanted to know what actually predicts whether someone will support the populist radical right. The answer wasn’t immigration. It wasn’t economics. It wasn’t religion. It was loneliness. Lonelier individuals were consistently more likely to support radical right movements, with the association holding across all fifteen years of Dutch data and appearing across multiple European countries. The researchers noted that the effect sizes were comparable to the known health correlates of loneliness, meaning that the connection between loneliness and far-right support was statistically as meaningful as the connection between loneliness and heart disease, high blood pressure, and depression. A 2021 RAND Corporation study of former extremists and their families confirmed this from the other direction. Half of the former extremists surveyed said feelings of marginalization drove them toward radicalization, with most citing isolation and loneliness specifically. Individuals reported that the social benefits of joining extremist organizations, the friendship, the camaraderie, the sense of finally belonging somewhere, were among the most powerful forces keeping them in. These people didn’t join a movement because they were convinced by policy arguments. They joined because someone finally made them feel like they weren’t alone. And that tells us more about what MAGA actually is than any analysis of tariffs or border policy ever could.
A woman stood up at a political rally and asked a sitting congressman to create a federal law that would force her adult daughter to let her see her grandchildren. Not a therapy session. Not a family mediator. Not a phone call to her daughter asking what went wrong. A federal law. That single moment contains more psychology than most textbooks. Because what she revealed, in front of cameras and a cheering crowd, wasn’t a grandmother’s heartbreak. It was a narcissist’s playbook when someone finally tells them no. How a boundary becomes a theft. In 2002, psychologist Roy Baumeister at Case Western Reserve University published a theory that combined two existing psychological frameworks into something new. The first was narcissism, the personality structure built around an inflated self-image that requires constant validation. The second was psychological reactance, a concept developed by Jack Brehm at the University of Kansas in 1966, which describes the motivational state people enter when they perceive their freedom as restricted. Brehm found that when people believe a choice or behavior has been taken from them, they experience an intense drive to restore it, often wanting the restricted option more than they did before it was restricted. Baumeister’s insight was that narcissism supercharges reactance. When an ordinary person encounters a boundary, they may be disappointed, but they can process it. When a narcissist encounters a boundary, they don’t experience disappointment. They experience theft. The boundary isn’t perceived as another person’s valid choice. It’s perceived as something that belongs to them being taken away. And they feel entitled to take it back by whatever means necessary. Baumeister called it narcissistic reactance. This grandmother didn’t process her daughter’s boundary as a painful but legitimate decision by an autonomous adult. She processed it as her property being stolen. Those grandchildren aren’t people her daughter is protecting. In her mind, they are hers. Access to them is her right. And no one, not even their own mother, gets to take what’s hers.